Paul Gavan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State to the House.

Sinn Féin supports this Bill. While it is essentially an exercise in legislative housekeeping, it provides an important focus on where the expenditure of the State is directed for the coming year. We tend to forget the huge sums of money involved when passing Estimates and the budget itself. I am pleased that in the past few years, there have been debates in the Oireachtas on this. While no one wishes to hold up the passage of the Bill, this debate gives us a chance to focus on where these sums are spent. I will make a couple of brief remarks on health expenditure before I finish.

So far this year, the HSE has spent more than €114 million on costly agency and locum doctors, nurses and other staff in order to fill posts left vacant due to the recruitment and retention crisis. This paints a picture of a health service that is running on empty. Indeed, this will be no surprise to the Minister of State as he will know that our local hospital in Limerick had the dubious celebration at the beginning of last month of having its 10,000th patient on a trolley. The situation has gone from bad to worse and, regrettably, has continued to do so over the past seven or eight years. The statistics speak for themselves. This paints a picture of a health service that is running on empty. In an alternative budget, which was costed by the Minister of State's Department, Sinn Féin has shown that one could pay off the health overspend and fund the health service to address the myriad of crises and deliver additional new services, all the while making sure it was done in a sustainable and fair way.

Using short-term volatile increases in corporation tax smacks of desperation and shows a lack of vision to fund vital services for the future. Let us consider the Supplementary Estimates for health. One can see that an increase of €655 million is needed to fill the ever-increasing funding black hole. Even though we want to see this money spent, it is important that the public are not misled. The reason this extra money is needed at the end of the year is due to the chronic under-investment in the health service. It does not represent actual investment in the future of the health service. A lot of this money is spent on expensive short-term measures that are designed to simply keep the show on the road. Having said that, Sinn Féin is happy to support the Bill.